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On This Day: Soviets Release U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers

February 10, 2011 06:00 AM

by
findingDulcinea Staff

On Feb. 10, 1962, U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers was returned to the U.S. in a prisoner exchange. Powers had been shot down in May 1960, creating an incident that destabilized U.S.-Soviet relations.

The incident caused great embarrassment for President Dwight Eisenhower and his administration. East-West relations reached new levels of hostility, as Soviet head Nikita Khrushchev walked out on the Paris Summit peace conference later that May.

Powers pleaded guilty to espionage that August and was sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison. He served 21 months before the U.S. secured his release through a prisoner exchange deal. He and Frederic Pryor, an American student who had been arrested in East Berlin, were exchanged for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy who had been arrested in 1957.

Powers received an unfriendly welcome when he returned home. Many Americans criticized him for failing destroy the evidence of his spying and for falling into enemy hands rather than committing suicide. However, the CIA and Senate Armed Services Select Committee investigated the matter and each determined that Powers had acted appropriately.

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The U.S. military had developed the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s in response to concerns about the Soviet Union’s growing array of military technology. The plane could fly at 70,000 feet, a height the U.S. believed was out of range for Soviet radar.

The CIA began operating U-2 spy missions in July 1956, and continued them over the next four years. Unbeknownst to the CIA, the Soviets did detect the plane on their radar, but they lacked the weaponry to shoot down the aircraft.

A U-2 plane did go down over Soviet territory in 1959, “but as long as there was no definitive proof connecting the flights to the United States there was no advantage for the Soviets to raise the issue publicly lest it draw attention to the Soviet inability to shoot down the offending flights,” according to the U.S. State Department.

The U-2 intelligence showed that U.S. concerns over Soviet military technology were unfounded. However, the CIA continued to operate missions. A U-2 flight on April 9, 1960, was attacked by Soviet fighter jets, which were unable to hit the aircraft.

Powers, flying 2,900 miles from a U.S. base in Pakistan to a base in Norway, was detected almost immediately after he entered Soviet territory, and attacked by MiG-19 and Su-9 jets and SAM ground missiles. Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita’s son, reports that several attacks—including a Kamikaze-style attack—failed before a SAM missile exploded behind the U-2 plane, disabling it.

Powers was unable to use his ejection seat, writes his son, Francis Gary Powers, Jr. in American Heritage. Instead, he opened the top on the plane and attempted to crawl out; when he removed his seat belt, he was immediately flung from the plane before he could activate the plane’s destruct mechanism. He was arrested soon after he landed on the ground.

Hoping to conceal the existence of the U-2 missions, the Eisenhower administration prepared a cover story. NASA put out a press release announcing that a weather research plane flying over Turkey had gone off track and possibly crashed in Soviet territory.

On May 7, Khrushchev announced that Powers was alive and that the Soviets had evidence he was operating a spy plane. “Like a chess master, the Soviet leader had lured his opponent into position and then sprung his trap,” recalled Cronkite. “With Powers alive in Moscow, Khrushchev had caught the United States in an untenable lie to its own people and the world.”

“Eisenhower’s statement left Khrushchev in a difficult position,” explains the State Department. “If he did nothing, that would be tantamount to acknowledging implicitly the right of the United States to spy. But any action Khrushchev did take had the potential to scuttle the upcoming conference and his larger plans for a Soviet-American detente.”

Khrushchev demanded an apology and an end to U.S. spying; Eisenhower refused to grant either. When they gathered in Paris, the two refused to shake hands or greet each other. Khrushchev led the Soviet delegation in walking out of the summit soon after it began.

On May 1, 2000, 40 years after he was shot down, Powers was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Department of Defense Prisoner of War Medal and National Defense Service Medal.

In 2006, Soviet records of his interrogation were made public, revealing that Powers had “displayed remarkable nerve,” according to the International Spy Museum. “Although questioned for eleven hours a day, every day, Powers said little of consequence and nothing proscribed by the CIA’s policy for captured pilots.”

The Eisenhower Library has a collection of memorandums, press releases and internal reports on the U-2 incident in PDF form. Yale Law School’s Avalon Project has several of the documents in HTML format.